The Literary Manuscripts of Lorna Goodison

There is, in fact, a longstanding connection between the West Indies and Canada going back to the eighteenth century, renewed over the past fifty years by the large number of citizens of West Indian heritage who have come to live in Canada, particularly in Toronto. This has been more formally acknowledged in a collaborative agreement between the University of Toronto and the University of the West Indies, signed in 1993, which provides for a wide range of activities bringing together scholars from the two universities. The Louise Bennett Graduate Exchange fellowship in Literature and Drama, established by the West Indian community in Toronto in honour of the renowned Jamaican storyteller and folklorist 'Miss Lou', represents a tangible expression of this collaboration. Without such initiatives, and the interest they have generated, we would not have acquired this collection.

There are other literary links, also going back to earlier days. In 1952, the Guyanese poet A.J. Seymour-editor of one of the most important publications of the day, the journal Kyk-Over-Al (named after a fort at the confluence of two rivers in Georgetown)-argued for a new kind of independence for the West Indies, an imaginative independence. To make his point, he quoted from the introduction to a new anthology of Canadian literature, edited by the poet and critic A.J.M. Smith. It was one of the first collections in the Commonwealth to break free from models of imperial achievement, rejecting what Smith called 'the colonial attitude of mind, a spirit that gratefully accepts a place of subordination, that looks elsewhere for its standards of excellence...setting the great good place not in its future but somewhere outside its own borders, somewhere beyond its possibilities'. Seymour called for West Indians to join with Canadians in freeing themselves from those colonial habits.

This was the period when it was still possible to say, as did the West Indian Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, that there is no West Indian literature. Some were saying the same thing about Canadian literature. All this was about to change; and as it did, Canadians and West Indians felt a common sense of cultural and artistic liberation, and nourished literary traditions that are now at the forefront of contemporary writing in English.

Born in Jamaica in 1947, Lorna Goodison is one of those who made this happen. She is also one of the most distinguished poets of our time. Her work appears in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, among the works of about a dozen living writers including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro and Anita Desai; and she is represented in major international anthologies of contemporary poetry such as the HarperCollins World Reader and the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. She has published widely in literary journals and magazines such as Saturday Night and MS Magazine; and her paintings-for she began her artistic career as a painter-have been exhibited throughout the Americas and in Europe. Her work has been translated into several languages, and she has performed at festivals around the world. But she has also read in schools, hospitals, prisons, community centres... to children, workers, people whose lives are not often shaped by poetry.

Her books of poetry include Tamarind Season (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1980), I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Press, 1986), Heartease (London: New Beacon Press, 1988); Selected Poems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); and To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995). She has a new book of poems, Turn Thanks, forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press early in 1999. And she has also published a very popular collection of short stories, Baby Mother and the King of Swords (Longman, 1990).

Lorna Goodison is no stranger to Toronto, having read here a number of times, most recently at the Harbourfront International Authors Festival, and she was a Commonwealth Fellow with the Women's Studies Programme at the University of Toronto in 1990-91. The collection acquired by the Fisher Library includes all of her papers, along with an important archive of pamphlets and posters from the period. There are over twenty notebooks and journals, several of them with pen and ink drawings, together with a very large number of separate holograph and typescript sheets. There are many versions of individual poems and stories, and a great deal of unpublished material, much of it remarkably fine. For scholars of both contemporary poetry and post-colonial literature, this is an exceptionally important collection.

Lorna Goodison began writing in the 1960s, at a time when Jamaica became independent. She was deeply influenced by the popular and political culture of this period, and her notebooks are rich with reference to the words and events that have shaped not only her own writing but the region itself. She grew up with the founders of Jamaican music, from rock steady to reggae; and her poetry, like the music of Bob Marley, catches the powerful imaginings of Rastafari. But like many of her contemporaries, she is also steeped in the canonical traditions of English literature, and her manuscripts provide evidence of her extensive reading in British and European writers from Wordsworth to Yeats, and from Anna Akhmatova to the great Sufi poet, Jalaludin Rumi. She seems to know much of this tradition by heart, as she does the Bible; but her writing reflects both her old world heritages, African and European, as well as her home in the Americas.

Most of all, it emerges from the experience of what it is fashionable to call hybridity. But she gives it a human face; and a walk. 'Great grandmother was a guinea woman,' begins one of her best known early poems,

wide eyes turning
the corners of her face
could see behind her,
her cheeks dusted with
a fine rash of jet-bead warts
that itched when the rain set up.

Great grandmother's waistline
the span of a headman's hand,
slender and tall like a cane stalk
with a guinea woman's antelope
  quick walk
and when she paused,
her gaze would look to sea
her profile fine like some ob-
  verse impression
on a guinea coin from royal
memory.

Lorna Goodison writes of ordinary experiences, especially the ordinary experiences of women, and makes them extraordinary. At the beginning of the History of the University of the West Indies, written by Philip Sherlock (historian, poet and its second Vice-Chancellor) and Rex Nettleford (founder of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica and its current Vice-Chancellor), there is a litany of the elements of West Indian life that could well be a catalogue of what is to be found in Lorna Goodison's manuscripts. And there is also a tribute to the poet herself.

The chief characters in our story appear only incidentally. They are the West Indian folk...Captured, sold, stripped of all the ties of affection and blood relationship, of the rights of personality and all the possessions that human beings hold dear, torn from their language groups, religious shrines, holy places, cut off from a past rich in tradition, separated from the guardianship of their ancestors and doomed to perpetual servitude in distant lands, subject to the whims of 'owners' and 'masters' who purchased them and gave them the legal standing of pieces of property, they endured...But their spirit remained unbroken...They created a score of creole languages, fashioned new religions out of fragments of memory blended with Catholic rites, established new forms of family and social relationships, and preserved a passion for freedom and justice. Among them were some who found out musical tunes, recited verses, crystalised a life-time of reflection into vivid folk-sayings, expressed their creativity in dance and sculpture and prepared the seed bed from which, in our time, has come the rich flowering of an indigenous culture.

Among the shapers of West Indian history the women stand tall...The women, like the men, were units of labour; in addition, they suffered as women, the terrible burden of sexual exploitation; they were at the centre of the slave community because they were essential for its preservation. Freedom did not put an end to the sexual or economic exploitation of women. Against this background the women, and the mothers especially, stand out for their courage and resilience in meeting the challenge of deprivation and change. Any West Indian knows of peasant women like the bone-thin elderly woman in the Duncans market in Trelawny, who, week after week, year after year, out of her meagre earnings sent her son Amos Foster to Scotland as a medical student and kept him there until he qualified and returned home; or like Lorna Goodison's mother [and here the authors quote from one of her most famous poems, 'For My Mother (May I Inherit Half her Strength)']

who sat at the first thing I
learned to read: 'Singer' and she
breast-fed my brother while she
sewed; and she taught us to read
while she sewed and she sat in
judgment over all our disputes as
she sewed.

She could work miracles, she
would make a garment from a
square of cloth in a span that
defied time. Or feed twenty
people on a stew made from
fallen-from-the-head cabbage
leaves and cho-cho and a palmful
of meat...

'We too have known mothers like Lorna's,' continue Sherlock and Nettleford, 'who met even the challenge of her husband's death with that walk, straight-backed, that she gave to us and buried him dry-eyed. Then days later, realizing that she did not have to be brave 'just this once', she cried. For her hands, grown coarse with raising nine children for her body for twenty years permanently fat for the time she pawned her machine for my sister's Senior Cambridge fees and for the pain she bore with the eyes of a queen and she cried also because she loved him.

This collection of manuscripts covers an exceptional period in West Indian cultural and political history, and it is filled with details of the life and thoughts and feelings of one of its most intelligent and imaginative witnesses. Lorna Goodison is still based in Jamaica, but for the past few years she has taught at the University of Michigan. She has kindly agreed to come to Toronto to help us celebrate this acquisition.

J. Edward Chamberlin
English and Comparative Literature